If you’re advertising with Meta, having high-quality creative assets is crucial to the success of your campaign. When someone is scrolling their Facebook or Instagram feed, they are looking at post after post of things that interest them. If the creative in your ad is boring or cliche, they will scroll right by, likely not even registering that it was ever there. On the other hand, if the creative in your ad is well-made and engaging, it can make a huge difference in “stopping the scroll” and it will have a marked effect on performance.
Do Your Research
When crafting creative assets for Meta, you should always start by conducting research. If you skip this step, you’ll be going in blind when making your creative assets, and they are likely to be ineffective.
Finding Inspiration
To begin, you don’t need to be doing in-depth research or seriously digging into data. Just start by paying attention to ads you are shown when using Meta products like Facebook and Instagram. When you see ads with creative assets you like, take a screenshot of it and jot down some notes on what you like about it and why. Before you know it, you’ll have a folder full of inspiration to draw from when creating your own assets.
Using Meta Ad Library
It’s also a good idea to see what your competitors are doing. To accomplish this, we recommend using the Meta Ad Library. This is a tool from Meta which allows you to view all active and past ads running on Meta platforms. You can search by ad type and keyword, making it extremely easy to see all of your competitor’s ads in one place. The Ad Library will tell you if an ad is active, when it went live, what platforms it’s being run on, and show you the creative assets being used. This allows you to keep track of current trends as well as find inspiration.
Learn About Meta Ad Specs
When making creative assets, it’s important that they meet certain specifications in order for them to be displayed properly on Meta platforms. These specifications include things like resolution, file size, and file type. The specifics will depend on what type of asset you are making, for example, an image vs a video. You can find a complete list of specifications for each specific asset type here. You will want to familiarize yourself with this information before you begin creating assets. Sticking to these specifications will ensure that your assets can be used in your Meta ad campaigns.
Creating Your Assets
Now that you’ve done all that research, you’re finally ready to begin crafting your creative assets. While doing so, you’ll want to keep these tips in mind:
- Make sure all images or videos are high quality. No one will take a brand seriously if their ads look cheap and low quality.
- Make your creative assets engaging. Ads should peak a potential customer’s interest. If your ad isn’t interesting in some way, people are likely to scroll right by.
- Showcase what makes your product different or better. This is an opportunity to show potential customers why they should choose you over a competitor.
Utilize these tips while crafting your creative assets and they will be much more likely to perform well.
Test, Test, and Test!
Even if you feel that a particular asset is performing well, that doesn’t mean a different one couldn’t perform better. That’s why testing is so important. It will tell you what works, what doesn’t work, and what works best. We like to think of testing as involving two phases.
Phase One Testing
Phase one consists of testing asset type and modality. Different types of assets include testimonial, how to guide, product in action, lifestyle, unboxing, classic product photo, and many more. Modality refers to whether the ad is image or video. No one type or modality is the definitive best, so it is important to try them all and see what works best for your brand.
Phase Two Testing
Phase two consists of expanding on what you learned in phase one. For example, let’s say your findings from phase one showed that video testimonials are the creative asset that performs best for you. Now in phase two, you should test new and different video testimonials. You could try changing the people in them , using different hooks, or any other small changes you can think of. This will lead to you finding the asset that performs better than the rest.
A/B Testing
In both testing phases, you should utilize A/B testing. This is comparing how two versions of the same asset perform with slight variations. For example, changing just the person in the ad, just the text, or any other variation you can think of. A/B testing is an extremely useful tool that will make it much easier to find out which version of your creative asset performs best.
Frequency
One final thing to keep in mind is frequency. Frequency refers to how often a particular ad is shown to a single user over time. This is a very important metric to track. If a user is shown your ads too frequently, they are likely to get annoyed, lowering the chances of them wanting to patronize your company. Too infrequently, and they may forget about your product after seeing it. Often, an individual needs to see an ad multiple times to take action. Frequency is calculated by dividing the total number of ad impressions by the number of unique users who saw the ad. We believe 1.8-4 is the ideal range for ad frequency. Under no circumstance should frequency go above 5. If frequency gets too high, consider pausing your campaign and refreshing creative assets to lower it.
Need Help with Your Creative Assets?
Whether you just need a refresh of existing assets or you’re starting from scratch, Rise Marketing Group can help. Click here to go to our ecommerce services page and fill out the contact form. We’ll get in touch as soon as possible to see how we can help!
